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Spinning the Media: Key findings in a week in the life of the media

2203 separate stories were analysed across 10 Australian newspapers between September 7 and 11, 2009, to see whether they were initiated by public relations or promotions. Here's what came out in the wash.

The least PR driven publication for this week was its competitor The Sydney Morning Herald with only 42% PR driven stories. Melbourne, the only other Australian city to have two metropolitan newspapers, followed a similar pattern: stories analysed in The Age were 47% public relations driven compared to 65% of The Herald Sun.

In this week, papers owned by News Ltd, which controls more than two-thirds of the Australian metropolitan print media market, were more PR driven than those owned by Fairfax Media.

Articles were identified across the Australian print media in which journalists put their by-line on stories that were republished press releases with little or no significant extra journalism work. Of 2203 articles, more than 500 or 24% had no significant extra perspective, source or content added by reporters.

News and feature stories were analysed across health, medicine, science, technology, business, politics, rural, arts, entertainment, environment and energy and motoring rounds. Different publications focus more heavily on different rounds so for this reason; we did not have the same number of articles in each round or across each publication.

The business and politics rounds had the lowest concentration of PR-driven journalism, with business coverage being half public relations driven (50%) and politics at more than one third at 37%. The lower figures for politics may be because more public relations activity happens behind the scenes through journalists’ relationships with politicians and their advisers and for that reason is harder to identify.

The highest levels of PR content were found in the innovation/technology (77%) and police (71%) rounds.

Fairfax has today apologised for publishing the story of "Louise", who said she'd been raped by Middle Eastern men. But alarm bells should have been ringing long before the article went to print, write Nicky Bryson and Myriam Robin.